WORDS

Today I dressed up. Black and white and red. I was getting ready for the Stendahl syndrome. I was going to be a ravished woman. Norway was going to ravish me. I was heading for the Lyngen Alps. Well, this miraculous mountain range in the Arctic is basically right outside Tromsø, but you can go all the way up to Alta through it. I didn't, even though I was tempted. I combined riding the bus with sailing instead. The Norwegians were yakking, while my heart kept rising. By the time it got to the throat, the breath was cut, and the only murmur I could utter, intoning to the Norwegian sound, was Norge min. My gut wanted to compensate for the lack of air and astonished muteness, but it was also hit hard. It was bleeding blood and snow. Bachelard's simplified cosmos—and mine—was doing its thing, which is to be vast and simple at the same time. Between the ohs, and the ahs, and Oh my God, and shut the fuck up, I was clasping my Tromsonian heart. It contains my mantra when here: skal ikke, it's written on it. I will not. I will not. I will not leave this place. I tell myself this every time. However, today, at the end of the day, I was disappointed in myself. I didn't think that I deserved to stay. Instead of allowing the sublime to humiliate me, crush me, and send me some place dying, I went rational and arrogant. Yes, I decided. The day I'll be able to afford it, I was going to buy the whole Lyngen fleet. And then, ban the yakking, ban the TV yakking, ban the bad musical lyrics yakking. Ban the bloody yakking. The only yakking I would allow, if I should ever want to transgress my own rules, would be in the bar in the company of Glenn Gould explaining, and then demonstrating, why he did this or that to his Bach recordings. That's it.

In other words, when we don't go with the sublime, we are into rescuing the world from its morbid fear of silence. Some irony. In the simplified cosmos, simplicity itself is but a shadow of itself. This side of whiteness and winter, we create narratives: there's a mountain here, and a sign there. Bathsheba was bathing on the roof when David saw her, and then it went as it did. And Solomon was chasing the goats up the hills with his head burning, while the Queen of Sheba was touching her small breasts, ever so passionately. And so on. Before my departure, I was wondering why the majestic V, carved into the mountain, insisted on washing its legs in the sun. What could that mean? What could that mean? Oh, Christ, give me a Norwegian to ask his opinion. The blue sky is turning whitish pinkish yellowish. I'm still not in bed, and yet I'm afraid that the dawn is here already, catching me yakking. We are all doomed to fail words and their shadows.